Wemyss Bay

Wemyss Bay Station

The name Wemyss Bay is applied to two quite distinct places. The
best known of them is the departure point for the CalMac
ferries to
Rothesay on
Bute, and for the associated terminus
of the railway from Glasgow. A
little to the north, between Wemyss Point and the A78, is the upmarket
settlement of Wemyss Bay.

Both aspects of Wemyss Bay date back less than 150 years, to the
arrival in 1865 of the railway from Glasgow. Until then many steamers
serving the fashionable Victorian watering holes of
Rothesay on Bute and
Millport on Cumbrae sailed from
Glasgow itself. But even in
those days, making the maximum use of limited leisure time was important, and
the Wemyss Bay Steamboat Company and the Caledonian Railway hoped to steal a
march on their competitors by carrying passengers by train to Wemyss Bay before
embarking them on steamers making much shorter crossings.

Poor management meant that the service limped along for a quarter
of a century until the Caledonian Railway took over the Wemyss Bay Steamboat
Company in 1893, launching instead the Caledonian Steam Packet Company. And to
complete the transformation, in 1903 they built an utterly magnificent new
station at Wemyss Bay and an adjoining new pier.

The station and the pier were restored to their original glory in
1993, and the awards since showered on them suggest that we are not alone in
feeling the result is the most beautiful railway station (and pier) in the
world.

The station is beautiful not so much for its half-timbered mock
Tudor exterior as for its glorious interior, which, especially if you catch it
on a day like the one illustrated here, is absolutely spellbinding. The result
does great credit to the work of the station's architect,
James Miller.

Until the mid 1800s, Wemyss Bay, said to be named after a local
fisherman, Robert Wemyss, had been a sparsely developed area. The arrival of
the railway had an immediate impact on this coastline. It meant that the well
to do no longer needed to live in Glasgow in order to work there. To the south
of the railway terminus the village of Skelmorlie grew up, while to the north
the especially rich started to develop Wemyss Bay.

Before long, the coast around Wemyss Bay to Wemyss Point became
home to large villas that, in turn, were home to the likes of the Chairman of
Cunard, and to James "Paraffin"
Young, who made his fortune developing the oil shale industry in
West Lothian. Some of the
grandest of the villas are no longer there, but Wemyss Bay as a settlement
retains a certain exclusivity.

Skelmorlie, to the south, and in
North Ayrshire rather
than Inverclyde, became
home to a lot of the "not quite so, but still fairly" rich. It is perhaps best
known for providing the measuring points for the Skelmorlie Mile a one mile long stretch of water offshore
from the village used to measure the top speed of steamers in the days before
more sophisticated means of measurement were available.